“I Resist” This Dumb YouTube Video

I watched a new YouTube video called, “I Resist,” so carefully I can tell you that at minute 1:46 the word subjugation is misspelled.

Yep—I took in every second and all I can say is, I’m sorry.

I’m sorry that the people who made this video, and the people who think it’s powerful or useful or important, don’t understand the fundamental problem with their point of view: it hurts the Palestinians.

Two year olds resist. Grownups say what they are for. Grownups get what they want. Two year olds get what grownups give them.

The Zionist movement, which resulted in the State of Israel, wasn’t a resistance movement against the Ottomans or the British. It was an ongoing campaign to build a Jewish state. It involved resistance, but its main focus was laying the diplomatic, technical, educational, economic and popular groundwork for a state.

It was against Bristih occupation, yes, but most importantly it was FOR a state.

So you resist. I get it. I’ll grant you many Palestinians have suffered.

(Sorry, I can’t grant you the use of the term, ‘genocide,’ even though I know you think it looks really good on posters and in Letters to the Editor. There are more Palestinians now than there were in 1948. The Palestinian population in Jerusalem increased 3% during 2008 while, in contrast, the Israeli population in Jerusalem increased by just one percent. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics announced on 20 October 2004 that the number of Palestinians worldwide at the end of 2003 was 9.6 million, an increase of 800,000 since 2001. If only Hitler had committed that kind of genocide against the Jews.)

And I’ll grant you it would be better for Israel, for the Palestinians, for the world, if Palestinians and Israelis could live in peace and justice.

Is that what you want?

Nope, you just want to ‘resist.’

On your video you show pictures of famous resisters, like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Sheikh Ahmen Yassin.

Huh???????

Did I just see that? You have a picture of the pro-Zionist, non-violent King, who wanted to reconcile black and white, Christian and Moslem and Jew, with the anti-Israel, anti-Jewish founder of Hamas, who sent suicide bombers against Jewish and Arab women and children and spoke against reconciliation with Israel AND with Jews.

You can have Yassin or you can have King, but you can’t have both. Decide.

Decide if you want to just resist, or if you want a state. If you want a state living in peace with Israel, the majority of Jews in Israel and abroad will support you. How do I know? Polls.

Decide if you want to resist, or if you want to compromise. The Prime Minister of Israel said he supports two states—call his bluff.

Decide if you want to resist, or if you want to roll the dice and hold out for a one-state solution, when demographic realities will force Israel to either relinquish the West Bank or be undemocratic. But if you want to wait, go ahead and write off another couple of generations of Palestinian children to conflict and bloodshed, and don’t count on things to go your way then, either. Israelis know how to count, too.

Decide if you want to just resist, like a dog on a leash, or if you want to be the masters of you and your children’s fates, as all the great Zionist leaders—pragmatists all—were.

Decide if you want to resist, and allow religious extremists to take over Palestinian territories, or if you want a state that allows dissent, freedom for all lifestyles, and opportunities for beautiful Palestinian women to compete for attention with beautiful Israeli women.

Decide if you want to be ‘resisters’ like the Hamas killers who send rockets into Sderot’s schools, and happily slaughter fellow Palestinians, or be healers, like the Gazan doctor Izeldin Abueliaish, who has not wavered in his belief that Jews and Arabs can live together.

“Palestinians and Jews were created to live together,“ Dr. Abuelaish told me. “And no one can deny the other one’s rights.”

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